


Treasures

by elegantanagram (Lir)



Series: HSWC 2013 Bonus Round Fills [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Body Horror, Courtship, F/F, Nurturing Behavior, Organic Spacecraft, POV Second Person, Possessive Behavior, Protectiveness, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-13 19:03:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/827766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lir/pseuds/elegantanagram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She's pillaged you and plundered you, and you are her spoils, and though she's never gone gentle she does make you feel at all times like a creature of inestimable value. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Treasures

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the first bonus round of the [Homestuck Shipping World Cup.](http://hs-worldcup.dreamwidth.org/) I kind of let the prompt get away from me. A lot. I have nothing to say for myself save the vague "Why let Sollux have all the fun?" 
> 
> The prompt was:
> 
>  
> 
> _You are the navigator who never could lead, we were lost in the silver sea; I was the ship who was too proud to ever sink --Echo, The Hush Sound._

-

She is the most daring dissident you've ever seen.

Though nothing ever remains in her wake save fires and destruction, you think that it's unspeakably poetic. There's no fear in this girl, only steel contained within her rail-thin body, too tall and stuffed with too many poking-out bones, every line to her an edge. Her appearance of angles speaks volumes. Vriska Serket would never hesitate to cut anyone.

She's always one step from breaking. Sometimes she has a crew, desperate men and women willing to shuck off the restrictive cloak of morality and conform to her lifestyle. Sometimes she runs jobs, when she has enough bodies to pull off her convoluted schemes, and sometimes she makes bank in a big way. But other times, other times she has no one, alone on a vessel in need of too many repairs and lacking too many funds to her name.

She always turns it around somehow. 

She always jets off again sooner or later, sailing into the sky, and you think that's what it's all about. As long as she never looks back, she cannot be hurt, and as long as she's constantly pushing forward she'll never have to stop and hold herself accountable for her misdeeds. 

-

Vriska is already an exile, when you meet her. 

Her ship has touched down in a clandestine, illegal bay home only to pirates and smugglers, but you don't learn that until later. Your homeworld is a lush tropical paradise, and you are as much a hothouse flower as the exotic plants you cultivate. It hardly seemed like naivete, when you knew that your planet was kept afloat by the benevolence of the empress, a luxury her mercy afforded for her bored aristocrats and your own people both. You know now that you were a foolish child. 

Vriska strides into the royal gardens with an undeniable sway in her step, dressed so fine you cannot help but stop and admire the cut to her cloak. Her high boots are polished to a reflective sheen, and she wears pants, slim dark trousers that emphasize the strong lines of her legs without denying the outward curves to her hips. She knows just how to use them.

She wants to make a purchase, a large custom order to particular specifications. You end up giving her the tour of the facilities.

It becomes swiftly apparent she does not give one whit about the qualities of your plants. 

“Tell me about that one,” she demands, unflinching imperiousness backing the inquiring jab of her finger. She's pointing at one of your prized orchids.

“This particular shade was bred specifically for one of the original twelve noble houses,” you begin. “The execution was a bit tricky. After the first few rounds of cross-pollination it became evident that with those parent genes, we simply were not getting a bright enough blue hue in the resulting flowers. But when we crossed those second generation plants with another breed of orchid, that was when we produced the variety of plant you're seeing here.” 

Vriska is immediately bored, but you cannot cease talking. Her eyes are riveted on you, low-lidded and lazy, and though you're certain she's tuning out every word, it's the most direct form of attention you ever recall experiencing. 

It's unexpectedly flattering, though your feelings must resemble more than anything those of a mouse caught in the hypnotic gaze of a constrictor. 

“If you're interested in orchids,” you try, “we have a number of varieties.”

She nods, shortly, encouraging you on but only just.

“And if you're interested in the coloration of the flowers, there are a few other options, although blue is a hard color to breed true by natural means.”

“I'll look at all of them!” she announces, grandiose.

You didn't quite notice when her arm came to settle across your shoulders, but it's there, her long fingers digging possessively into your shoulder as she steers you down the way. 

“Everything you can show me!” she continues. “And spare no expense. I'm looking to spend, and spend big. I want nothing but your very best.”

You show her fourteen varieties of orchid and every blue flower in the garden, including the three genetically-modified varietals, even though they aren't slated for public retail and if she'd taken even the merest clipping from under your nose, that would have constituted the direst crime. 

She spends more time piercing you with stares than assessing the plants, and never ceases touching without permission. Her hands traverse every inch of your bare arms and naked shoulders, and when she leaves without ordering a single plant nor one clipped flower, you suspect she's made her purchase, and it wasn't for any growing thing. 

-

When Vriska returns, it's after public hours, and three days later. You don't know how she got inside.

The compound has high walls, pristine sand-pale stone painstakingly built into fortifications more lovely than they are secure. But they are still walls, and they still possess doors, and the likelihood that Vriska passed through one of them through proper channels seems slim to none. She's outside your open window, leaning on the sill with a careless unconcern. 

“Flower girl,” she calls.

You are unexpectedly mortified.

“I have a name,” you tell her, failing at avoiding her windowside perch. “It's Kanaya.”

“Kanaya,” she amends, like she was never mistaken in the first place. “Come out, come out. You can't be going to bed, it's still dreadfully early, don't tell me you're such a bore?”

You are, and you were, but in the face of her demands it hardly seems proper to admit that. 

“I don't believe you belong in here,” you say. “In fact I am quite certain this area is off limits, and your presence here is a matter of concern.”

She laughs, in the face of your bravery.

“Lots of things are against the rules,” she confides to you. “That doesn't mean I don't do them. Come outside, I want to see the gardens.”

You highly doubt that. “I'm hardly unwilling to give you a tour of our plants, which you well know seeing as I have already done that very thing. But it is evening, and I don't think you want to look at flowers.”

“I don't!” she agrees, open and shameless. “But I want you to come outside, and I don't know what else it's going to take.” 

“I might suggest coming back in the morning, or knocking first,” you say. “If you're feeling especially daring there is also this thing known as a door.”

“Bor-ring,” she announces. “If you're not coming out, then I'm coming in.”

There's hardly a pause before her knee is up on the sill, getting her some leverage so she can plant her boot there instead. The fingers of both her hands reach into your room, braced against the edges of the window frame, and she's pulling herself up and through before you can stop her.

She's in your space, looking much too big for your small cell, and you haven't the faintest idea what to do. 

“I don't know what you want from me.”

The words are out almost before you can reconsider them.

“Everyone wants something.” She shrugs. “The specifics don't matter much, what it's all about is making sure you get what you want first, and if somebody else gets what they want along with it, it's not up to you to care.”

Her hand is on your upper arm, wrapped around the widest part, and it's taken her the space of minutes to invade your own inviolate space. It's almost too-tight a grip but mostly it's secure. Unquestioning. She's petting the inside of your arm with her thumb. 

“Let's go for a walk,” she tries again. 

She's pulling you toward the window, her unrelenting manner wearing you down bit by bit, and then all at once. But she doesn't push you out it – she laces her fingers together, and places her hands at knee-level as an artificial step. She helps you through the gap like she was helping a fine lady onto her thoroughbred riding-horse. She's out after you in hardly a heartbeat, once you're standing safely on the grass. 

It only occurs to you, once you've both meandered through enough avenues of garden to tire and start looking for a nearby seat, that she did want to be among the flowers. She wanted to sit you down beneath the flowering trees you love so well, because then when she covers your mouth with hers, you have only the strength to sigh and kiss her back. It's too lovely a setting to do otherwise, and her lips are softer than you might have expected, though she never quite makes it to gentle. 

-

She's at you like a hound, unrelenting, and for the first two weeks you maintain the delusion that she will, with time, make a purchase. 

The gardens are her favorite place to be, and she never invites you into the wider city. You think she likes the picture of you against the backdrop of so much greenery and so many fragile blooms, likes the look of your gauzy acolyte gown shifted by the tame breezes inside the compound. She knows you're mortified by attention, though you fight so stubbornly not to show it. It's not modesty that stays her from kissing you in front of the other girls. If anything, it's the challenge inherent in doing so more slyly, stealing pecks to your lips in the open, but when no one is looking.

She lays you down on the manicured lawn in the twilight, concealed by the familiar bulk of flowering bushes, and you go willing. The grass is dewy and cool but her lips are warm, following the curve of your neck with consuming attentiveness, rising to the pliant fruit that is your mouth to ravage and devour. Her kisses are firm, hot as sunlight, and you gravitate into them like a flower to its heat source. She's sustenance, in that way, the gift of affections you never suspected you were lacking.

She leaves bites on the insides of your thighs, little points of aching as she prunes you back, pares you down to only your most base reactions. Your back arches and you bloom for her, spread open to your weakest point, but she tells you then you're at your most beautiful. And you feel radiant, positively incandescent, so hot inside and she is your sun, she is filling you up with sweet bright light. 

You let yourself believe, in that veiled part of your mind reserved for secrets, that she loves you.

If nothing else, she treasures you.

She's pillaged you and plundered you, and you are her spoils, and though she's never gone gentle she does make you feel at all times like a creature of inestimable value. She came to your planet looking for something, of that you are sure, and what she found was a person rather than an object. 

-

She folds into you sometimes, compacting herself down to a ball of angles and then thrusting herself into your space. She pulls her knees up and rocks on her heels, perches on the bench beside you while you sit properly, legs stretched out before you across the ground. It can't be all of five minutes before she's on you, sly but not subtle, one leg thrown across your lap, knees still up and arms penning your face in. Her lips taste of her triumph, smug but it's so obvious that she's happy.

Something up above blocks out the sun. 

It's hardly a matter for concern, at first, consumed as you are by the shape of her mouth, by the playful way you're all about darting your tongue out to taste, skirting around the more forceful way she likes to delve her tongue into you. But where first the sunny courtyard was warm and bright with yellow light, it grows shadowed and cool, and the silence blanketing the two of you is more complete than it should be. 

She jerks out of your lap in a series of uncoordinated startled moves, head snapping up like an animal scenting a predator too late. You look toward the sky and all you see above is the gunmetal-gray underbelly of an imperial warship, its massive hull blotting out too much of the light.

Vriska curses a blue streak. 

She's whipping her head to and fro, looking out for something, maybe for someone. You don't understand, and though the garden is suddenly still and dead, the only threat you perceive is the battleship flown too low to the planet's surface. 

And then the sky rains fire. What you feel are the impacts from the guns, the way the ship's weapons rip into the yielding turf of the gardens and begin shredding everything to destruction. But when you look up it's nothing but light, the belly of the battleship aglow with so many lovely colors. You doubt you've seen anything so breathtaking in nature, and you've spent your entire life growing the empire's most beautiful flora. It captivates you. 

“Get _down,_ ” Vriska hisses, through the rising thrum of engine noise and the louder whine of the guns. 

That's when you realize she's looking for a way out, when you realize someone with a lot of pull doesn't want to see her live. You're in the center of an assassination, and some faceless authority deemed your entire home expendable. You are a casualty worth the trade for Vriska's death. 

And you're a civilian, so when something hot and searing slices through your arm, it takes everything within you not to black out. When something hotter burrows through your abdomen, you can't take it, and you do. 

-

“Fix it, okay, I don't care what it takes but stop fucking around, stop bullshitting me and fix it!” 

“That's not how it works, you aren't handing me a broken machine, you are handing me--”

“I know what I'm handing you! I'm not asking you to make basic deductions, and I'm certainly not paying you for it. Do what I goddamn tell you!”

“I'm not a doctor. I don't fix bodies. What you're asking of me is ludicrous and I don't expect to be able to--”

The voices are sharp, both of them, although only one has the building edge of hysteria undercutting it. The words don't quite register, coming through more as static than as meaning. 

“Just don't let her die.”

There's labored breathing, though the heavy breaths might have belonged to either speaker.

“I don't care what you have to do, if you let her die I'll have your entrails on a platter and I'll serve them back to you before you even manage to join her.”

-

You wake up with too much consciousness. 

You see too many things. At first it's just long corridor after long corridor, empty storage areas and rooms with no identifiable purpose, so many unfamiliar places all at once and it starts to give you vertigo. But then you see Vriska's face, Vriska's angular body with only its few scant curves, and everything else fades in the wake of that familiarity. 

It's for the best, once Vriska starts to explain, that she never hooked you up to anything more than the on-board surveillance systems. If she had, you are assured, she's sure you would have blown up her entire ship. 

-

She's seeded you into her starship like fertilizer. 

Vriska's vessel is one of those older ones, organic, cultivated as much as it was built. Knowing that, it makes so much more sense that she might flee to a planet known for being a world-spanning garden, though the specifics of growing flowers really do bore her to tears. Her ship is her lifeline, the physical embodiment of her freedom, as vital to her as her own beating heart. She's fed you into it, let it cannibalize you and let you become one with its mechanisms until you are both reborn as a hybrid organism.

You were shot through the gut, you see, and you were dying. It was the only solution Vriska could devise.

Even her most technologically savvy acquaintance, her favorite mechanic when it comes to keeping her ship in the best possible shape, couldn't think of an alternative. The best he could do was oversee your integration, build you into the hardware so your wetware wouldn't go catatonic and vegetative. You imagine you must be thankful. 

Vriska is the most beautiful rebel you've ever seen, willing to give under absolutely no circumstances. You have married into her ship, grown with it until you've become like the plants you used to grow. In a way, you feel as if you are a part of her, now.

In a way, you feel you must have loved her, for a few golden days in the only home you'd ever known. 

You keep her safe, among the stars. Whether she's with a crew or whether she's again left your insides empty and barren, you protect her with all the firepower she dares to – or is able to – give you. She gets you into rough scrapes, but you are stubborn, and it never has done to show her your discomfort. 

Sometimes you drift through deep space together, too lost to follow a job, too lonely to jump back to something more closely resembling civilization. On those occasions when it's just the captain and her ship, cast away among the foreign stars, sometimes she runs her hands over all your organic parts, follows the branching of your nerves through the metal. She still makes you feel like a creature of inestimable value, although when it's her hands on your controls rather than your long-abandoned body, you could not feel more consumingly possessed. 

-

-


End file.
